Origin of my art - A Satirical Essay

By Tripp Gregson​When discussing my artwork, I am often asked, “How do you come up with all this?” or more bluntly, “Do you just lie around awake at night and think this $@#! up?” This always elicits my smile, because lying around dreaming things up is part of the answer, but it’s much more than that.

Art is what happens when one’s spirit collides with the material world…filtered through the brain, shaped by the past, set free as a new creation into the present…and for me, the byproduct of that creation is great joy.

Imagine a big, round wad of crinkled-up duct tape about the size of a basketball, easy to get your hands around, but massive enough to be reckoned with. On the surface, the sticky side is out in some places, the tape folded and twisted, but basically round enough to roll. This ball of tape is a bit like my memory [not my head] [oddly enough, it looks a bit like my brain], bobbling through time, its sticky parts picking up this and that, gradually gaining speed and size [like myself] as gooey temporal tidbits are ripped from the space-time continuum. This is akin to removing a bandage from a particularly hairy patch of skin, or if that’s too graphic, perhaps, like a lint roller whisking a gray cat hair from your favorite black wool coat. [either way, the analogy is hair on tape]

All that stickiness aside, my memories are filled with simple shapes and objects… In my Spartan, but well disciplined elementary school, the music teacher arrived in the classroom, rescuing me from a math worksheet. With a knowing glance toward the music teacher, my classroom teacher transferred the helm, slipping off to the lounge for a quick nicotine fix, or cup of coffee. As our teacher’s clicking heels disappeared down the hallway, my euphoria over ditching the long-division, turned to mild disappointment when, forming the rag-tag orchestra, I was, once again, relegated to the sand blocks, close cousin to the equally mind-numbing rhythm-sticks.

I often wonder if I had been the “chosen” one, receiving the tambourine or the coveted xylophone, if my career would have angled toward the performing arts. This is unlikely, because even back then, I was prone to follow the creative [mischievous] voices in my head, beckoning me to sand my neighbor’s sticks with my blocks. Yes, mine was a world of these simple shapes, sometimes turned tools, but always associated with fun.

I’m not sure the teacher relayed my abrasive habits to my parents, but my dad often took me with him to the furniture factory after hours where he worked in the office. There, he left me to roam the expansive production areas, where I explored a jungle of massive, sawdust covered, green machines interconnected by a helter-skelter network of ducts and wires. Amongst the crooked trails intertwining these behemoths, I would entertain myself by fondling leftover bits of upholstery fabric, rescuing bits of wood from the floor and running my hands along the metallic surfaces made smooth by countless repetitious operations of cutting, drilling, or sanding. My father, keen on me reaching adulthood with ten fingers, always made sure the entire factory was powered-down, it’s machinery safely idle. Even though I didn’t get to use this machinery till much older, there was no mistaking the awesome creative power of the equipment.

Since then, my desire to work with tools has never been quenched.Hardly a week goes by that I don’t think to myself, “See dad, I’ve not cut my finger off yet,” though he’s not been privy to the close calls I occasionally have. I don’t know if my old report cards described me as destructive or disruptive, but my teachers would certainly marvel at all the things I do with sandpaper now. As for the leftover bits of fabric and wood from the factory floor, my love for making art from squirreled-away bits and pieces of recycled material is the cornerstone of my operation. I now cut, drill, and sand to my heart’s delight, bound by no one, free to mix and match materials with wild abandon.

I was a kid in the 60’s, known as a decade of wild abandon, however, I only got little tastes of it as it trickled down to rural North Carolina. I imagine my teacher glued to the TV at night to watch “Laugh In, or Flip Wilson” then guiltily marching to school the next day, determined to purge those wild ideas by making an example of that longhaired anarchist, Tripp Gregson. On weekdays, I couldn’t wait to get away from the bland pallet of construction paper and mimeographed worksheets, home to my room to bask in the titillating glow of black light offering-up it’s mutant photons to excite the many posters tacked to my wall. Whether it was the mutant photons, or just the stark contrast to the imagery I was bombarded with at school, I was profoundly influenced by the graphics and colors of the quasi drug-induced pop-art posters of the 60’s and early 70’s. Saving my allowance, I would mount my banana-seated bicycle, and pedal off to the record store to bargain for damaged posters destined for the trash. In this manner, I acquired a myriad of psychedelic blacklight posters, and constructed my own mod bachelor pad on the curtained lower level of my bunk bed. [picture an adolescent Austin Powers with good teeth]

Looking back, my posters definitely had that drug-culture feel, but I didn’t need to do drugs; my world was too interesting to lose focus. I was, however, influenced by drugs - the medicine cabinet variety. I remember spending time w/ my grandparents and sneaking off with my cousin to explore the tall metal cupboard filled with tiny bottles brimming with pills and elixirs. I loved to look at the different colors of glass and the curious labels with colorful graphic designs. There are those of you out there saying, sure, right, you were doing weed and hitting grandma’s alcohol-laden cough syrup. I was high all right, but on shapes and colors, not drugs.

Occasionally, my family would head off on vacation, the station wagon’s simulated wood grain vinyl sides cutting a blue streak down the highway. Despite my father’s unfailing propensity for speed and punctuality [“We could be at Stuckey’s by supper time if this %#&! Truck would just get outta my way!] our vacations were fun, if not linguistically colorful. I remember the trips to Florida where we stayed in motels with brightly colored neon lights, the little crooked section at the lower edge of the sign, advertising the pool, electrically buzzing on and off, foreshadowing the actual condition of the pool and room. There were restaurants beside the highway, dwarfed by their own signs made of boomerang shapes, pierced by bright red structural steel and cascading spheres, pointing the would-be customer to a dining room filled with the cacophony of watered-down music dodging its way through clinking china, the smell of syrup and bacon, snippets of conversation bouncing off vaulted ceilings, lit by brightly colored parabolic light fixtures dangling like cheap costume jewelry…the feel of cool textured vinyl supported by brightly polished chrome, the lure of foil-wrapped pats of real butter [my appetizers, eaten singly or with crackers].

These memories of shapes, colors, and textures intertwine randomly inside the sticky tape ball - blacklight posters mashed against medicine bottles, boomerang shapes crisscrossed by rhythm sticks, attitudes, smells, emotions, discoveries, wishes, simulated wood grain vinyl, all there patiently waiting for the present moment where they can break free, like a beautiful butterfly [no simulated wood grain please] leaving the cocoon. So here I am in the present moment, surrounded by my tools, unraveling the past, and setting free my recycled treasures in new and joyous ways. If you take a close look at my art, you can catch a drift of my anti-authoritarian attitudes in cut-up traffic signs, appreciate my retro-nouveau sense of shape, and my never-ending look onto the brighter side through use of humor and color.